ALL OF THE GOOD ONES ARE TAKEN:

Where have all our migrants gone? Eastern Europe wants them back. (Michael J. Jordan, 1/10/07, The Christian Science Monitor)

As Western Europeans fret about a new wave of Eastern Europeans flooding their countries - this time from Romania and Bulgaria, the EU's newest members - those nations have an opposite concern: how to bring those immigrants home.

For a small country like Lithuania, with a low birthrate but high rates of immigration, alcoholism, and suicide, the situation is particularly urgent. The former communist nation of 4 million has seen at least 400,000 people migrate west, whether to work construction in Dublin, pick strawberries in southern Spain, or conduct research in Scandinavia.

"We must invite them back," says Zilvinas Beliauskas, director of the government- supported Returning Lithuanian Information Center. "We should consider them an integral part of the nation."

No developed nation can afford to lose them though.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 9, 2007 5:28 PM